MSI Wind Box Intel Atom 330 NetTops

Written by Michael Larabel in Computers on 9 March 2010 at 02:00 AM EST. Page 2 of 3. 7 Comments.

MSI offers several different nettop computers with different enclosures. The two units we have are housed in a small (mostly plastic) chassis with dimensions of approximately 30 x 22 x 7 cm. These enclosures do not have any optical disk drive bay, but MSI does offer such models as well in a slightly larger case.


The 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US are designed to stand upright with four small feet on the unit. On the front of the case are a multimedia card reader (SD/MMC/MS/XD), two USB 2.0 ports, the power switch, and the front panel LED indicators. That's it. On the rear are headphone and audio output ports, two more USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, +19V DC input, and VGA D-Sub. The nettop bearing the ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics also has an HDMI port, but sadly, the Intel graphics unit does not. VGA D-Sub is rather antiquated and we would much rather see DVI or HDMI rather than a lone analog connection. There is also a Kensington lock slot on the back of this unit for those looking to deter theft.


To access the inside of the Intel computer, three screws need to be removed from the bottom that will allow the side panel to come off. Once inside the mini PCI Express slot is accessible as well as the 3.5-inch hard drive bay. Due to the Serial ATA power and data connections being soldered on the motherboard itself, only supported are standard 3.5-inch SATA drives but neither a 2.5-inch SSD/HDD with a 3.5-inch adapter will not work nor any other peculiar configurations. To access the motherboard's lone DDR2 memory slot as well as the Compact Flash slot, the MSI motherboard needs to be removed. Only seven screws secure the motherboard in place, but the front panel on the case also needs to be removed. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a tedious process to access the RAM and in the process of doing so on both cases, we actually broke the front panels. The front panel is secured via two tiny plastic clips (one on each side) and with both of the MSI nettops we had, one of the clips on each of them ended up being snapped off even when handling it gently. MSI could improve here with making the removable front panel more reliable. We ended up needing to tape the front panel into place.


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